In the past, I was a strong proponent of digital networked voting systems in general, as a means to bring us closer to direct democracy. I had hoped that we wou

In the past, I was a strong proponent of digital networked voting systems in general, as a means to bring us closer to direct democracy. I had hoped that we would be able to vote on specific issues, continuously, with little ceremony or friction. I thought that we might be able to make it as simple as hitting a +/- X button, where X is your current share of the decision (you have a pool of votes for many subjects). The thought was, that even though a system like this could not be understood by current people, future people would have a reason to learn the technology, as they learned about vehicles and the web, because it shapes every facet of their society, in real time. It would also give us a clear case for legislating software and hardware security standards. Not my area of expertise, but do you think that standards could be devised and mandated to make hardware verification feasible, at least for medium-tech applications? So, that's how honest people desire technological progress in the voting system. Now, I can see that we need to keep these endeavors low-key, while we cross the gap of failure between "interesting" and "robust". It could take us generations to cross that gap. Let's just keep all this experimental stuff in the digital currency / digital contract field, for now, and tell the dreamers to be patient, rather than insisting that we abandon the whole idea.